Integrating Oberon Resources into the World-Wide Web

Abstract

The World-Wide Web (WWW) is currently one of the most popular network information systems on the Intemet The range of items that may be accessed within the WWW includes hypertext documents, images, sound pattems and video sequences. To identify these items, their location and the method to acquire them, a generic naming scheme is provided. Besides the identification of these items it allows to specify and parametrize activities that construct items “on-the-fly”. Hence, aspects of interaction may be introduced to the information system.

In our paper we discuss this interactive potential power of the WWW, especially how to obtain this power from the oberon operating system. Our attention is directed to aspects of information provision, i.e. we explore the suitability of the Oberon system for a WWW information server. The objective is the integration of interactive Oberon applications and services in the global WWW document space. Hence, we allow remotely to invoke Oberon activities which produce textual or graphical data from any location in the world. The integration is based on a simple server framework that allows to attach Oberon services to the WWW with minimal implementation effort.